Shot analysis #1 - Hercules

Hey everyone! It has been a very long time since I posted anything but I decided I wanted to start a new series of videos where I break down some animated shots and just talk about what I love about them. These are much more off the cuff and unorganized than my other videos but they are a lot easier to do. Anyway! I hope you guys enjoy it and feel free to ask some questions if I was unclear about something.

Quick Test - Emotion Change

Look Test Final from AFighting Panda on Vimeo.

So this is just me playing around and quickly doing something with the new Zoey rig from ianiamte. I decided I wanted to focus on the face and do some basic facial acting. So, I just came up with this. Spent a couple days on it, so not too bad time wise but I know I can do better.

A Ball and a Horse

Hey everyone.  I have a couple of test to share with you guys today.  The first one I have is a flipbook test that I did.  It has been years since I have done any kind of 2d work and I was never very good at 2d.  If you guys have seen any of my drawings you can guess why!  But I took a shot at making a bouncing ball test.  I ended up doing a quickie bouncing ball in about 20 minutes.  I think it turned out OK.  I am gonna keep trying my hand at flipbook tests and see if I can manage anything that is decent in 2d. 

The next test I have to share is my first cg animal test.  I had found a decent horse rig about a year ago and I had always wanted to do a test with it.  When I was at CTN this last year I got a Rhino House dvd at the Rhino House booth.  For those of you who don’t know Rhino House is a reference site for animators, they have dvds and an online component.  Check their site out it is pretty great.   I ended up deciding to do a horse gallop and it turned out pretty good I think.  The rig has a few problems but for a run cycle or walk cycle it is more than good enough to get some decent looking work.  I had a lot of fun doing this animal animation and I plan on doing some more in the future.  It just goes to show once again that the work you create using reference is always better and more appealing than the work you just try to throw together out of your head.  

Pandas animation tricks #11

In this video I talk about animating weight shifts and the general thought process that goes into shifting the weight of the body. Sorry about the audio quality guys, it isn't nearly as good as it has been recently. Anyway I will try to have another one as soon as I can. I have actually generated a list of ideas now so I can start going through those as I find the time. A couple of the ideas I have are fairly large in scope so those should be interesting to tackle. Anyway guys I hope this helps a few of you out. Until next time!

If you are interested in using Lt Dan you can get it here.

Rio Comparison and some General News

Password is: education

I found this video over at the 11 second club so I am sure a few of you have already seen it. However it is worth posting again since it is great to be able to see the reference and thought process that goes into making these great, great shots. I would like to thank Jeff Gabor for posting this video because it is going to really get the animation community fired up, I know I am.

Update about whats going on with me.

So, workshop 5 of ianimate ended this week. It was a pretty amazing workshop I must say. I had Mike Walling, who is an amazing guy and a great animator. I wound up doing an old clip I found months and months ago which fit the bill for the workshop. It was actually a clip that was in my "must animate pile" so that was really great. I had a really clear vision as far as the emotions and the beats I wanted to hit and the shots are coming along. I have a lot left to do on my shots before they are finished. I would say I am 60 percent done. I know I am not going to be able to finish everything over this 3 week break but I figure I will get as much as I can done. After I get the shots all splined out and cleaned up I am thinking I am going to post up some videos from along the process. The video reference, The blocking, and the final animation. I think I may even toss the layout in as an extra, so you can look forward to that. As far as next workshop I am going into the final workshop at ianimate, which is pretty exciting. I am going to be working on my reel. I will be polishing up some old work and making a new shot to fill in the gaps that my reel currently has. All in all, I had a great time this workshop and hopefully I have just as much fun the next workshop. As far as the blog goes. I have 2-3 different ideas for the next pandas animation tricks video I just need to sit down and make it. Sadly I have been having technical problems with my recording software so I will have to figure that out before I can add any new videos, so it may be a little while, we shall see. Anyway guys thank you for reading, I really appreciate the support. Reading the great comments I get really makes making my videos worth while so thanks a lot for that.

Pandas animation tricks #10

On this edition of Pandas animation tricks I am talking about tracking spheres. A quick little trick that can help refine the spacing of an animation in the later stages of spline and polish. Not much to say about this one other than, I hope you find it useful.

In other news I am about to wrap up workshop 5 of ianimate. It has been a great workshop thus far and I have really been enjoying myself. One more workshop to go and I am ready to jump back into the fray.

Pandas animation tricks #9

Hey everyone. In this Pandas animation tricks segment I am showing how I use the free application screen marker which is a nifty little tool that lets you draw over any application. In the video I cover how I use screen marker when I animate and what I feel that it is good for. I hope you guys enjoy this one. You can download screen marker here...

http://www.screenmarker.com/

Andreas Deja's new blog!

Hey guys, I just found out about Andreas Deja's new blog. So far not much going on with it since it is so new. It looks like he is going to be posting up a lot of animation work from his own personal collection so I am assuming we are going to be seeing a lot of stuff we might not otherwise ever get to see. Should be quite fun to watch and I am glad that at least one of these amazing animators from the Disney Renaissance/ new golden age are getting into social media if only a little bit.

The Work! The Work!

So I have finished my first workshop at ianiamte! Woot! Actually I finished it about 3 weeks ago and I am just now getting to posting this stuff up. I think it is time for a bit of a recap (since its been so long). My experience at ianimate so far has been pretty positive, I must say. I had Tal Shwarzman as my instructor and he was awesome. He was strait to the point and called us all out on any bull we were trying to skate by with, and I loved that. It was tough though, I gotta say my second shot especially was a rocky, rocky road. I only just got it to a point where I feel like I should be sharing it. I still got a couple tweaks to do that will be hard to notice once implemented. At least for the non animation savvy. I have met a ton of really cool people at ianimate and some just amazing talent. Really top notch guys at this place and I have a feeling most are going to be pretty successful in the animation world eventually. As for the site it was a bit of a rough start but the kinks are pretty much worked out now and everyone is settling in. We are starting to get a lot of neat rigs now which is great. Having access to some top notch, user friendly rigs is just an amazing resource. I just Started Workshop 4 last week which is full body acting. That is going to be interesting I have to say. My instructor David Hubert seems like a pretty cool guy and I hope to learn a lot form him. I don't have much to say about him yet just because we have only had a couple classes. Needless to say I have high hopes for my next couple of shots I will be working on and since I have already started my block of my next piece that enthusiasm is definitely needed. I am going to try to post more often than I did this last Workshop. That way I wont have to do a gigantic post like this again....

About my shots for workshop 3....

In workshop 3 we do two shots which are close up acting shots. We can do whatever we want and use whatever rig we want. It basically splits into two shots at 7 weeks each to complete them. Now this was pretty rough on me because of two things 1. I am a very very weak actor. I have been studying more and more into acting than I ever have before. I am very comfortable now with physical motion so acting is the next stage of my animation learning. 2. I am weak with facial expressions. I have a really hard time posing out nice appealing natural looking facial expressions. When you are doing close up facial acting those two areas are kind of important. Needless to say it was pretty rough. But I learned a ton on both shots. The second shot most of all. Probably because it was a female character and I have done so few of them up to this point. Also the whole issue of me not being a female makes it hard to really dig into that mind set. It was an uphill battle the entire time. But I think both shots are OK. Neither are ground breaking in any sense but both are fairly solid and I am proud of a lot of the work I did. Anyway I will stop blabbing. Please enjoy my shots and if you have any comments or questions please feel free to share.

New Reel!

Yay! I just finished editing my new reel together. This reel is based more towards games stuff. since I finished it a few days early I think I am going to try to do one more shot to put into it but for now this is it. I may tweek a couple of shots depending upon the feedback I get from people but this is pretty much the new reel I have been working on for so long. Just a side note I did both the guy jumping the cliffs and the ogre swinging the hammer in 6 days. so it was about three days for each animation. I am kind of proud of that although I feel the ogre swinging the hammer needs a lot more work I am just not seeing things as clearly as I would like. Now all I have to do is clean up these couple of shots and then try to get another shot done before I start at ianimate.net Anyway guys that is my update for now, I feel like I have been posting a lot recently but that is only because I have been doing so much work. So until next time have a good one guys! OH, and wish me luck on the job hunt!

walk into run and other things

So I just finished up my walk into a run transition. I am OK with it, I think it works, I don't love it to death or anything but its hard to love a transition animation you know? Anyway I have enough time to do one more shot for my reel I think. The problem is that I don't know what that shot is going to be. I hadn't really thought about it yet and I need to figure out what I am going to do and then do some reference for it as soon as possible so that I can get to work on this new shot. It needs to be something physical and I really want it to either be funny or just really cool. I have an idea for a chase scene including a dinosaur the only problem with that is the dinosaur rig I have is pretty weak. Its alright but there are a couple of key functionality things that I really would like it to have that it doesn't. Also I could see doing a creature animation like that taking a lot longer to do since I have never really delved into creature stuff yet. Oh well we shall see what I come up with. This post is really about this new addition to my reel which I think should help me out quite a bit. Anyway till next time you guys have a good one!

Game reel stuff - Death animation

So I am working on my game reel right now trying to get it done before I start ianimate.net in early september. I just finished up the render on it so here is the video. If you see any problems let me know please and also let me know if you think the colors are working. I may have to go tweak them because they are quite vibrant. Anyway I am on to my other couple animations I need to get finished in the next week or so. continued later....

So instead of adding a new post I am going to add to this one. I had a grand idea of what my "game reel should be" it was leaning heavily on cycles and the like. I got an email from a guy I know who is pretty cool and he is a game animator and he was nice enough to throw me some pointers. he basically said game animation isnt all cycles. He said a lot of things but the big thing for me was the idea that it wasnt about making a character move in a cycle but what you can do with a cycle that counts. That kind of made me think about my approach in general. I have been for a long time been working on my stuff thinking that if it was technically good then there ya go end of story I should land a job with that. That obviously isnt the case at this point. I see guys getting jobs out there with reels that arent technically as polished as my own but I will admit that their reels are more ENTERTAINING! I can have the the most polished reel on the planet but when it comes time to remember who's reel had the most impact who are you going to care about more? The guy that made you go "oh that is technically well done" or the guy that made you laugh? I think the answer is obvious. But to push that idea farther what if you got the laugh and it was well animated? That is where I need to be. So I scrapped a couple of ideas I had for shots I was going to do and have come up with different ones that should be more interesting and entertaining overall. The death animation is going to stay though cause I think its alright and the feedback I have gotten so far has been pretty minimal so I am feeling good about that.

New shot and a bit of bad news.

So I did a post where I showed a screen cap of a new shot I was starting which I was really interested in and was super excited about. The problem was that about two weeks ago my comp got a HORRIBLE virus. I basically lost a week and a half of animation work and completely lost that new shot. Didn't even have the set up shots I made which sucks because I felt like it would have been cool. But anyway no reason to cry over lost animation files. On another note I was skimming through some audio files and I found one that was just SOOO funny I have never seen the movie this comes from but this is really funny and I loved it so much I dropped everything to do a block on it. So here below this post is my blocking of this new shot. I don't know if its going to turn out great but I really really need to replace the dialogue shot I did at AI since it really isn't that good or at least to the level I know I am at. For when I made it it is fine but I am better than that now.

run cycle mayhem!

this is my new run cycle looking for crits!

Note I have been getting a lot of really good crits lately so soon I should have a good solid finished version of this done and then I can move onto doing a transition between a run into a walk. Since my walk is already done I got a lot of the components under way.

Got 30th.....sadly.

So I finished up my animation for the 11 second club for April 2010. The votes were cast and I got 30th out of 177 entries. Which sucks to be honest. I figured I was going to grab at least a top 25....bleh. Oh well just have to do it better next time. Doing a self critique I can see that I just didn't get the emotional resonance I wanted too with the final look for the female character. I really should have pushed the camera closer to her face as well as pushed the emotions she was feeling. I also feel like I could have polished a couple of moves, one in particular. If I had to do it again I would have reconsidered the leaning on a table thing. That was just a technical challenge across the board. Having to make sure that the arms and hands and fingers don't clip through the geometry was a bear to handle and took a lot of time which I could have spent elsewhere. I was also relying too much on my animation to convey what I wanted to. Though that is my primary function, it isn't the only aspect of animation, there were a lot of things I could have pushed and improved in order to have pushed my entry farther up the voting charts. Such as working on better textures and lighting, going through the trouble of finding real clothes and hair. Doing the little details such as adding some kind of text on the document the guy slides over. All of these things would have pushed the shot farther if not the animation. Overall I think its an OK little piece. It sure isn't reel material by any stretch of the imagination but its OK.

11 second club April

So I am doing the 11 second club this month, I got a pretty late start so its going to be a sprint to the finish on this one. I am trying to get the emotion to work on this scene before I go to spline because if its not working in the blocking it wont work in the splined version. I am really trying to do something more based in reality here as well as trying to do more with texture and varied timings. I have noticed that I want to gravitate towards a singular timing every shot that I do and need to break myself off of that, so that is what I am trying to do. Anyway if anyone has anything to say feel free to yell at me because I could use any input that I can get on this one.

heads up on an update. In a couple of weeks I will be putting up my updated reel which is hopefully significantly better than the original reel I graduated with. I will go ahead and post up both assuming I can find the original. I have been working on these different shots for over a year now trying to get that as good as I can. Granted that year had a lot of other things going on besides just working on this stuff but its still been a year in the making. I sure hope that at the end of this long road will be a good job waiting for me and the chance to really finally get good at this animation thing. But I am just throwing a heads up that in about two weeks this whole thing should be done, or so I am planning. Then the job hunt begins!!!!.....AGAIN!